


(and the punchline to the joke is asking) Someone Save Us

by WolfeyedWitch



Series: Hunters and Halfas [3]
Category: Danny Phantom, Supernatural
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Title: Meanwhile in Amity Park, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, How Do I Tag, Hurt/Comfort, I'm out of practice y'all, School, Slice of Life, Sort of? - Freeform, With varying levels of success, everyone is dealing with trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 09:01:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29931045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolfeyedWitch/pseuds/WolfeyedWitch
Summary: Danny may not be in Amity Park, but Sam, Jazz, and Tucker are. And by God, they were going to make it better for him.
Relationships: (implied at least), Danny Fenton & Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Danny Fenton & Jazz Fenton, Danny Fenton/Sam Manson, Jazz Fenton & Sam Manson
Series: Hunters and Halfas [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1517585
Comments: 29
Kudos: 112





	(and the punchline to the joke is asking) Someone Save Us

**Author's Note:**

> *peeks out of hiding* uh, hi! Nice to see you all there! Waiting! For me to write something! Ha ha....
> 
> This is the next part in the series with Actual Plot. I will continue adding chapters to Introductions, on my regular schedule of "none whatsoever", but hopefully with shorter intervals between chapters. 
> 
> Work and chapter titles are from MCR songs. I'm writing about high school, so I'm embracing my past Emo Kid school vibes. 
> 
> Also, shoutout to my beta reader, who told me that he is now going to download the rest of Danny Phantom and watch it, because he'd only seen the first few episodes but my writing made him want to see the rest. I'd say you're a flatterer, except I know you're not, so I'll just say that you're really sweet.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jazz is an adult. She is totally handling this well. Definitely.
> 
> Or: Jazz has a conversation with Danny, and then an excursion with Sam and Tucker.

Danny has been gone for a month when in their regular phone call, he asked a question that floored Jazz: “Was this my fault?”

“What?” she said. The question startled her out of her measured pacing of the length of Sam’s guest room.

Where was that coming from? She knew his mental state was less than stellar; whose would be, when their own parents treated them like a lab rat? So yes, Jazz knew her brother had been struggling. She had been keeping tabs on it: the victim blaming, internalizing of his… abusers’... (it was still hard to think that term about their parents, but there really wasn’t a better one, and she had to face reality about this so that she could keep helping Danny) reasoning, the self doubt, the troubled sleep. All the symptoms of C-PTSD that came from the lovely cocktail of being a half-ghost superhero who was reviled by half the town he worked to save, and having ghost-hunting parents who regularly threatened to tear his ghostly persona apart “molecule by molecule”. 

“All of it, Jazz! I could have prevented this entire scenario if I’d just told them that I was Phantom sooner. You remember the Freakshow alternate timeline; they would have accepted me. Did I cause all of this because I was too shit-scared to talk to my own parents?”

So yes. Danny hadn’t been in the best mental state, but he seemed like he was making progress towards accepting that what they did was wrong and he deserved better. And as much as she knew healing wasn’t linear, this seemed like a significant step backwards. 

First step first, though. Address his argument.

“Danny,” she began gently. “You had your reasons for keeping it secret, and they were good ones. You told me yourself that you asked Clockwork about that timeline, and he said it was probably for the best that you took their memories. You didn’t keep this from them just on a whim. Tell me what your reasoning was.”

She knew it, but it was best if he said it himself.

“I wanted them to accept Phantom as a ghost, not as an exception to ghosts,” Danny said after a pause.

“Exactly. You wanted to keep Fenton and Phantom separate so that you could work to change their minds about ghosts. If you’d told them you were both, they would have accepted it, yes, but it wouldn’t be the same.”

Jazz could see exactly how that would play out, was the thing. She could picture exactly how their parents would keep hunting ghosts, keep up their unethical experiments, and justify that Danny didn’t count as valid data against their hypotheses because his human side was staving off the “corruption” of his ghostly nature. And that made her need to take a few deep breaths before talking again, to prevent the anger at their parents from leaking into her voice and being misinterpreted.

“As for if this could have been prevented… I don’t know. If you had told them, sure, this particular scenario wouldn’t have happened, but who knows what else might have? We can’t predict that, little brother.”

“Unlike some cryptic gear-wielding ghosts…” Danny muttered.

“All I know is that _this is not your fault._ You did the best you could with the situation you were dealing with. Anyone who says differently will have to go through me,” Jazz continued.

“Great, I’ll just tell my subconscious that it has to go to you first,” Danny said darkly.

Ah. That might explain this. “What brought this on?” she asked. She had a theory, but she needed to have it confirmed or denied. “Are you having the dreams again?”

The line went quiet for a moment, then a long sigh came through the speaker. “Yeah. But now he says that this is what’s going to make me go down that path, not the…” he audibly swallowed. “Explosion.”

“Does he still prattle on about inevitability?” Jazz asked wryly. Her theory was right. Danny’s fears were manifesting as the figure of Dan Phantom in his dreams. 

“When does he _not,”_ Danny grumbled. 

That brought a half-hearted chuckle to Jazz’s lips. She quickly sobered again, though. All of this was adding up to a less-than-pretty picture: the increased emotional volatility, the worsening PTSD symptoms, and the recurring nightmares of his future self all pointed to an issue with his ghostly half.

Luckily, she was the foremost (and probably only, at least for now) expert on ghost psychology. She was the best equipped a big sister could be to help her little brother. And for issues with his ghost half, she had to look to his ghostly needs.

“Danny, when’s the last time you went on a hunt?” she asked.

“Uh….” She could practically hear him doing the mental math. “The night I met the guys, so… a month ago now? Or near enough, anyway.”

That was… not so good. But definitely fixable. She was a Fenton, dammit. And if there was anything Fentons were, they were tenacious.

“Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do.” She gathered her thoughts into a coherent plan of action. “You are going to hand the phone to one of the hunters standing nearby to keep an eye on you. Then I want you to go out of your earshot so I can talk to them privately. Keep up the dream journal we talked about, and text me later tonight so we can set up the next time we can talk. Sound good?” 

“I guess?” Danny sounded confused. “Um, what do you need to talk to the guys in private for?”

“It’s nothing bad,” she hastily assured him. Though that phrase might not have been the most reassuring one she could have picked. “I just need to make sure that they’re taking care of my little brother properly,” she said, making her voice as saccharine sweet as she could.

It had the desired effect. “Ugh. Fine, sure, be weird at them instead of at me.” Then, muffled, “Dean, my sister wants to talk to you!”

Jazz smiled to herself. Best way to get a little brother to leave the conversation: embarrassment. She felt a little bad about manipulating him, but she wasn’t actually lying, and this conversation did need to happen. Danny would just never do it himself.

After some muffled noises of a phone being passed, a new voice came over the phone, deep and gruff. “Hello?”

“Hello,” Jazz echoed. “This is Jasmine Fenton, Danny’s sister. Am I correct that I am speaking to Dean Winchester?”

“Yeah, this is Dean,” the deep voice said.

“Excellent,” Jazz replied. “Could you please confirm for me that Danny is out of earshot?”

“And how exactly am I supposed to do that? It’s not like I can necessarily see the kid; he can turn invisible.”

A fair point, and one that Jazz had already accounted for. “Repeat these words: everyone else knew that Danny Fenton and Sam Manson were lovebirds before they did.”

Dean dutifully said his line, and Jazz was able to hear, even with her limited human senses, the far-off squawk of “ _Lovebirds?!!?”_

“Yeah, and you can take your lovebird ass farther away and stop eavesdropping on this conversation, Spooky!” Dean said. 

Jazz stifled a laugh. Despite their differences in approach, they were definitely both older siblings, used to dealing with their younger brothers’ antics.

“So,” Dean said after giving Danny time to get out of earshot. “What exactly is it you wanted to talk to me in private about? I assume it’s about your brother.”

“It is,” Jazz confirmed. “First, I want your word that you will not mention anything about this conversation to him. You may—and honestly should, thinking about it, since I can’t exactly do it myself—tell your brother and Mr. Singer about it, but under no circumstances should you ever tell Danny about this.”

“I’m not promising that,” Dean said. “Not without knowing what it is you wanna talk about and why.”

Jazz sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. That was both frustrating and heartening. Frustrating because she seemingly wouldn’t get an easy answer, and heartening that Dean wasn’t willing to promise something that might be dangerous to her own little brother.

“You’re an older brother.” It wasn’t a question, but Dean made a noise of affirmation anyway. “What would you do to keep your younger brother safe?”

“Anything,” Dean said, no hesitation at all.

“So would I,” Jazz said. “That’s what this conversation is about.”

“Alright. I promise I won’t tell Danny about this conversation, so long as we don’t talk about anything that might hurt him.”

Jazz sighed again, this time in relief. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” Dean said. Like it was just that easy.

Well, that might have been the easiest part of the conversation. Which meant it was only going to get more difficult from here. 

“Have you gone hunting since my brother has been living with you?” Jazz asked.

“Uh… yeah, a couple times. Why?”

She ignored the question and asked one of her own. “And of those hunts, how many did you take Danny along for?”

“None,” Dean said, anger in his tone. “Like hell am I going to take a kid hunting; I wouldn’t put anyone else through that.”

Well, that was another note to go into her mental file on the hunters. Dean started hunting young, and who knew what his parental figures (other than Bobby) were like.

“And that would be admirable, if Danny were purely human,” Jazz said cooly.

“What?”

Jazz suppressed another sigh and rolled her eyes skywards, pleading the universe for patience. “Danny isn’t entirely human. He’s also part ghost, which means that he has not only human needs, but also ghostly ones that he needs to fulfil.”

And now they got to the crux of the matter. “Look. The _only_ reason I am telling you this is because it is having a direct impact on my little brother’s mental and physical health. Otherwise I would never betray his confidence like this. But you need to know, and he won’t, _can’t,_ tell you.”

This time she didn’t bother suppressing the sigh. “Do you know what a ghostly obsession is?”

“‘Course,” Dean said easily. “Our ghosts and your ‘ghosts’ are a little different, but that’s the same between the two. There’s something that ties them here, something that they’re compelled to do that’s keeping them from moving on. That’s the short answer, anyway.”

“And I could write a thesis on the long answer, but the short version will suffice for now,” Jazz said. 

“You’re saying Danny isn’t doing whatever his obsession is, and that’s why he’s getting worse instead of better?” Dean asked. 

“Precisely.” It was good to know he’d been paying attention and knew that Danny wasn’t okay.

“Well, what is his obsession?”

“And this is why I had to make sure Danny was out of earshot,” Jazz said ruefully. “In ghost culture, asking that is _extremely_ taboo. It’s just not done. Asking a ghost about their obsession is akin to a personal attack.”

“Oh,” Dean said, sounding taken aback. 

“And if these were normal circumstances, I would never tell you either. But like I said, this is important for you to know.”

“If it’s so taboo for ghosts to talk about, how do you know what Danny’s obsession is?”

“I observed and I made an educated guess,” Jazz said. “And this time spent not fulfilling it proved me right.”

“So, Danny’s obsession is hunting?” Dean asked, sounding confused. 

Good. He should be confused by that. It meant that he had actually paid any kind of attention to the type of person Danny was. 

“Not exactly,” Jazz said. “Hunting is a means to an end. I believe that my brother’s obsession has to do with protection.”

“So hunting lets him work through that, by taking out whatever has been hurting people,” Dean said.

“Exactly,” she said, grateful that Dean at least seemed to understand. “If my brother were anyone else, I would be glad that you’re keeping him away from hunting. You’ve kept him safe, and met the needs of his human side, and I appreciate that. But by doing that, you are actively preventing what his ghost side needs.”

“Right,” Dean said thoughtfully. “I’ll talk it through with Sam and Bobby, see if we can find some milk run type hunt to bring him on. Keep him safe and let him get back into it.”

“Thank you,” Jazz said sincerely. “And like I said, do not bring this up with him. If he draws conclusions on his own, fine. But don’t talk to him about it.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” the hunter said.

“You had better,” Jazz said, tone growing serious once more. “Keep my brother safe, Dean Winchester. Take good care of him. Because if you don’t, you’re going to learn that my brother may be the one with ghost powers, but I’m the one you should be afraid of.”

Jazz hung up before he could respond. She then carefully set her phone down, layed down on Sam’s guest bed, covered her face with a pillow, and screamed.

Okay. Okay. This was okay. She had done a good job, if she did say so herself. Dean now knew more about Danny and how to help him. She was keeping an eye on her brother, and gathering allies to help her with that task. 

She had done a good job being an adult. Now she got a short break to take care of her own mental health. 

She accomplished this by screaming once more into the pillow.

Shortly after her little screaming match, there was a soft knock at the door, followed by the sound of it opening. 

Without bothering to take the pillow off her face, Jazz said, “It really only counts as respecting people’s privacy if you wait until after they’ve said something to come in.”

“Yeah, I only got about half of that, but I’m going to assume it’s about me coming in without waiting for you to say it’s okay,” came Sam’s voice. “And since this is my house, where you are hiding out, I’m going to go out on a limb and say we can stretch the usual rules of hospitality.”

Jazz sat up, moved the pillow back to its usual configuration, and glared at the goth.

Sam, seemingly impervious to glares by sheer power of gothic will, ignored Jazz’s look entirely. “The talk went that well, huh?”

Jazz, being a sensible, competent adult, did not succumb to the desire to scream into a pillow again. “My little brother is hurting, and I can’t be there to do anything about it. All I can do is talk to him long distance, and talk to the people who are there to support him in person.”

“Well, I do have an idea of something else you can do,” Sam said, the beginnings of a sly grin stretching across her features.

Jazz quirked an eyebrow.

“You wanna go break into FentonWorks and steal their intellectual property?”

Jazz blinked at that question. Then again. And then once more for good measure. “Actually yeah, let’s go.”

Sam’s grin turned sharp and toothy. “Great. I’ll call Tucker. It’ll be our back-to-school breaking and entering party!”

Jazz dropped her head back onto the pillows and questioned how her life had gotten this weird.

Then again, if it would help her brother, she wouldn’t have it any other way.

Twenty minutes later, the girls left the house to meet Tucker at FentonWorks. Sam’s grandmother Ida had seen them out with a call of “Have fun storming the castle!” and a cheerful cackle. 

“Your grandmother is weird,” Jazz said, after the woman in question had roared away into the bowels of the Manson mansion on her mobility scooter.

Sam grinned. “Yeah, Bubbe’s great. Why else would I let her in on you staying here?”

Fair.

They met Tucker outside the door of FentonWorks. 

“Did you get it set up?” Sam asked.

Tucker held up his PDA, showing a blinking red dot on the opposite side of town. 

“The Fentons have left the building,” he said dramatically, to which the girls groaned. “I bribed Boxy with a couple boxes to go make a little trouble, then disappear as soon as Jack and Maddie show up.”

“Good old Box Ghost; at least we always know how to bribe him,” Sam said. 

Jazz studied the map. “With this distance and how Jack drives, they should get there in about ten minutes. If it takes them five minutes to find the Box Ghost, another five to keep looking for him after he makes his exit, and another ten to get back here, that’s roughly a half hour total.”

“I’d put it at about thirty seconds to find Boxy, and ten minutes to keep chasing him,” Tucker said. “But yeah, sounds about right overall. They left just before you got here, so that gives us about another eight minutes for them to get to the warehouse district. I’m tapped into the security systems, including the ghost alarms, so I’ll know when they find our little distraction and when they start heading back.”

He took his PDA back from Jazz and tapped at the screen, making it show a ticking timer. “Countdown starts now. Let’s make this count.”

With Jazz there, no breaking was required to enter. Her genetics were all the key they needed. The trio swiftly made their way down to the lab.

“And you’re sure they’ll notice if their files on Phantom get mysteriously corrupted?” Tucker asked, sounding like he knew the answer but had to ask anyway.

“ _Yes_ ,” Jazz hissed. “You do anything to those files, they’re automatically going to assume it’s ghosts. If they can’t find anything on their security about ghosts, then they’re just going to tighten security. It isn’t worth it.”

Tucker grumbled, but obligingly focused his search of their files on a different area. 

“Are you going to have enough time to download all of it?” Sam asked, glancing at the timer nervously.

“I prioritized the download order, like we agreed,” Tucker said, not glancing away from where files flew by on the screen as he searched for the data they needed. “So no matter what happens, we’ll get the most important stuff first. And I’m using the backdoor I installed with Danny; the Fentons will never know I was even here.”

 _Good,_ Jazz thought fervently. They needed her parents to believe Sam and Tucker were too distraught about losing their friend to even think about ghosts for the moment, and that Jazz was still out of state starting her first semester of college. If Jack and Maddie knew what they were really doing…

Tucker’s PDA let out a beep. Sam glanced at the screen and said, “Two minute warning.”

“Not including time for our exit?” Jazz asked nervously.

“Of course,” Tucker said, still staring at the screen. “I wrote that algorithm myself. The timer is just for the hacking; once it’s done, you’ve still got time to get out. Gotta make sure you’ve got time to make a getaway before the cops come knocking.”

“Or the GIW,” Sam added darkly.

 _Or the Fentons,_ Jazz thought ruefully. 

“Almost… there! Exit strategy, now!” Tucker said suddenly.

The three of them quickly left FentonWorks after making sure their tracks were covered. They were a half block away when they heard the unmistakable combination of screeching car tires and a booming man’s voice that could only mean the Fentons had arrived back home. 

From there, the three went their separate ways; Tucker back to the Foley residence, Sam and Jazz back to the Manson mansion. 

Once the girls had arrived, Jazz pulled out her phone and looked at the email she had received from Tucker. 

“This is just gibberish,” she said, confused.

“No, it’s just encoded,” Sam shot back. She pulled up her copy of the email on her computer and quickly ran a program that transformed the short bits of gibberish into a much longer, much more meaningful set of files.

Jazz took a minute to marvel at the amount of work her brother and his friends had put into this. Backdoors into FentonWorks, timer algorithms that account for response times, encryption codes that let them pass the information freely via email without fear of it being intercepted. It was both awe-inspiring, and horrifying. 

_They’re just kids,_ Jazz thought, horrified all over again by the situation. _They should be worrying about crushes, and homework, and the latest school drama. Not… life and afterlife situations. Not minimizing collateral damage and keeping themselves sane in the process._

“We got it,” Sam said reverently, bringing Jazz out of her thoughts. “All the schematics. All the weapons, the trackers, the containment devices. We got it all.”

Jazz let herself grin, wide and feral. She wasn’t there for her brother when he needed her most. She couldn’t be there with him right now. But this? This was something she could do.

“Let’s get to work.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you all for sticking around until... I... finally write more? In all seriousness, thank you all so much for your comments and kudos. It means the world to me.
> 
> I accept comments, kudos, constructive criticism, capslock vents, and pterodactyl shrieking as feedback!


End file.
